


if it's a day that ends in y

by Siria



Category: Castle
Genre: Community: help_pakistan, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-09-06
Updated: 2010-09-06
Packaged: 2017-10-11 12:50:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,444
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/112604
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Siria/pseuds/Siria
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"This," Castle breathed, "is <i>awesome</i>."</p>
            </blockquote>





	if it's a day that ends in y

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ciderpress](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=ciderpress).



> Written for Ciderpress, as part of the help_pakistan auction. I got as many of your likes in here as I could, I think! (I hope!) With thanks to Sheafrotherdon for betaing, and Dogeared and Trinityofone for advice and encouragement.

"This," Castle breathed, "is _awesome_."

Kate ignored him in favour of listening to what Lanie had to say. "So you can't call time of death yet?"

"Not precisely," Lanie said. "Not when the body's been in a heated studio like this. Right now, given the level of rigor mortis, I want to say about eight hours, but it might be longer than that. I'll be able to estimate better after I'm done with the autopsy."

"Eight to ten hours ago would put DiNatale in the area," Kate said. She folded her arms and tried her best not to feel vindicated—she'd known in her gut that DiNatale was connected to this spate of murders, and now she was just a little bit closer to finding concrete proof of that.

"I mean," Castle continued, "not that I'm saying it's awesome that the guy got murdered because, you know. _Murder_. But this guy was killed while he was folded into a really complicated yoga… thing—"

"Supta Virasana," Esposito supplied from the other side of the room.

"Bro," Ryan said, "it kills me that you know this stuff."

"—and the rigor mortis _keeps_ him there."

Kate sighed. It was about time she started carrying a bottle of Excedrin with her whenever they got called out on a case. It was very hard to concentrate on what was possibly the latest instalment in a serial killing spree when you had a thumping headache. "Castle, please don't poke the body. It's disrespectful."

"It's a marvel of forensic science!" Castle said, holding up his hands and wiggling his fingers as if to say _See? No touching_! "I'm just appreciating it. With my fingers."

"Keep poking my body," Lanie said, "and you'll find you no longer have a matching set of those fingers."

"Why, Lanie Parish," Castle said, voice smooth and edged with all the innuendo of which a man-child was capable, "you sure do know how to keep a guy keen." Kate had the dark suspicion that he had actually batted his eyelashes.

"I have all kinds of tricks," Lanie said, stripping off her gloves with an audible latex _snap. _

"And how they fill my dreams!" Castle said grandly. He spread his arms wide, like a ringmaster under the spotlights in a Big Top. With the exception of Kate and Lanie, everyone else in the room ignored him—the forensics team continued to take photos of the crime scene and dust for prints; Ryan and Esposito bickered quietly as they examined the room's heating system.

"Course," Lanie continued, mock thoughtful, "lots of them are illegal in the state of New York."

Castle made a show of gulping audibly, tugging at the already unbuttoned collar of his shirt. "That is so hot."

Both Kate and Lanie rolled their eyes, then stood back as the body was carefully placed into an oversized body bag and carried out of the room. Lanie tucked a stray curl behind her ear and said, "I've got two other urgent cases ahead of this guy, but I should get to him by this afternoon. I'll have the preliminary results to you this evening, maybe tomorrow morning. Tox screens will take a while, though."

Kate nodded. If DiNatale had kept to the same MO with this vic, the toxicologists would be kept busy finding new toxins in the guy's blood for months. "Thanks, Lanie."

"Oh, no need to thank me," Lanie sighed. "I guess I didn't want to go on that date tonight after all."

Kate grinned at her, momentarily distracted from the task at hand. "With Kyle? The guy from the ESU, the one with the…" She gestured.

"Yeah," Lanie said, "_that_ one. I hope he'll be okay with a really, really late dinner instead."

For Lanie's sake, Kate hoped so. She and Kyle had been dancing around one another for long enough. She didn't know how two otherwise confident people could turn so middle school around one another—especially when they so clearly made one another very happy.

"Okay, simple question here," Castle said. "Well, I have a couple of questions, actually, but we'll start with the first one."

"Okay," Kate said carefully. Having been on the receiving end of one of Castle's 'simple questions' a time or two, she was appropriately wary.

"First, why do people always make that hand gesture about Kyle? And why is it that everyone _else_ always seems to know what it means, but they never explain it?"

"Dude." Esposito had drifted back over to them. "You might be straight, but you have _eyes_. You've seen Cho. How can you not know what that means?"

"It just seems rather vague!" Castle said. "And quite frankly anatomically improbable."

Esposito looked at Ryan. Ryan looked at Esposito. "Bro, you've never been in the locker rooms at the same time as Cho, have you?" Ryan said. "Congratulations, Lanie, by the way. Good job."

"Thank you, Kevin," Lanie said. She _dimpled_, and Castle looked like he was on the verge of asking something that could have them all called up on sexual harassment charges—Kate swore she could see his ears pricking up, as if he were a Labrador puppy which had just picked up an intriguing new scent. A distraction was clearly in order.

She cleared her throat as Lanie followed the rest of the forensic team out of the yoga studio. "You said you had _another_ question?"

"Well, more an observation, really," Castle said. He was trying to look nonchalant and humble, which of course meant that he was about five seconds away from bouncing around the room and declaring the case solved, solved, through the power of his genius. "Our mysterious deceased yoga… dude—"

"Yogi," Esposito supplied.

Ryan frowned. "What, like the bear?"

"No," Esposito said. "A practitioner of yoga is called a yogi." He didn't sigh when he spoke, but from the long-suffering look on his face, Kate could tell that the urge was there; it was an urge she'd experienced many, many times since she'd first been forced to work with Castle.

"—_as I was saying_," Castle said, looking not a little irritated that he wasn't receiving people's full and undivided attention. "This unknown guy was found in a Bikram yoga studio on a Saturday morning. None of the staff here has ever seen him before, he's got no ID on him, but he's dressed in some pretty expensive yoga clothes and the posture looks like he knows what he's doing. If we hadn't gotten that call from our enigmatic, taunting killer—"

"DiNatale," Kate supplied firmly.

Ryan made a soft noise of protest. "We don't know that for certain. This could be someone else."

"It's him," Kate said. She wasn't particularly interested in having this argument with anyone again. Her gut told her it was DiNatale, and she was going to go with it, no matter the reservations almost everyone else seemed to have.

Castle snapped his fingers. "Hello, trying to make a point here? Anytime you all want to pay attention."

Kate didn't even attempt to hide how much the Castle Dog and Pony Show irritated her. "Yes, Castle?" she said, words full of honeyed bite. She restrained herself from tapping the toe of her boot against the polished wooden floor, but only just.

"So far, our killer's MO has been to kill people in ways that don't _look_ like murder, then inform the NYPD so it can taunt you guys for not picking up on it. This guy's methodical, he's careful, and we have no idea how high his body count really is. So why, after months of this, would he leave our John Doe's body in a yoga studio where he's completely unknown? And why make sure he's dressed in some very expensive yoga gear, but leave some greying sports socks on his feet?"

Kate blinked. "His socks?"

Castle waved a hand. "Mother flirted with yoga for a couple of months—with the yoga instructor for about three weeks longer than that—and she bought all the clothes and the equipment. Mat, blocks, DVDs—and a couple of very expensive pairs of socks made especially for doing yoga, so your feet don't slip when you're in a pose. You can do yoga barefoot, or in those yoga socks, but not—"

"—in sports socks with a hole in the big toe," Kate finished. Castle was right. She hated it when he was right.

Castle looked like the cat that got the cream. He grinned smugly, folding his arms over his chest. He was wearing that ridiculous bulletproof vest with WRITER written across the front; there had been absolutely no call for precautions like that, but hadn't stopped him. He'd tugged it on in the car on the way here, protesting loudly that he had a teenage daughter for whom he was responsible, and with a serial killer on the loose, he wasn't going to be taking any chances.

(How Castle still thought that he was mostly raising Alexis and not the other way around, Kate had no clue.)

"So what, he's getting sloppy?" Esposito asked. "Getting over-confident, thinking we won't catch him?"

"Could be," Kate said. "Or maybe he was interrupted when he was staging the crime scene. Do we know what time the first employee got here this morning?"

Ryan riffled through his notebook. "That would be one Diana Alvarez, has been teaching here part-time for the last eight months. She said she got here about seven, maybe ten after; security footage in the lobby shows her walking in at exactly 7:08. Comes in, turns on the lights, opens the main doors, turns on the computer systems. Notices that the heating system has been left on in one of the studios, goes in to turn it off, finds our bendy friend. 911 call logged at 7:21."

"That earlier than usual for her?" Esposito asked.

Ryan nodded. "Normally she doesn't get here til 7:45 on Saturdays, but a new course was supposed to start today, so she got here early to do the admin stuff."

"So he thought he had more time to finish up, heard Alvarez come in and probably ran out through the back entrance—no security cameras, leads onto a pretty empty alleyway." Kate frowned, calling up the layout of the surrounding streets in her mind. "Chances are he headed towards Seventh Avenue and the nearest subway stop. Five or six minutes to get there—we need to get a hold of the security footage taken around the stop from about 7:10 to 7:30 or so. If DiNatale shows up there…"

"_If_ he does, we've got one piece of circumstantial evidence than we had before," Castle said.

"It's a start," Kate said. "I'll take it."

"Of course," Ryan said, "could just be a nut with a thing for sports socks."

"Like that perp from the Upper East Side?" Esposito said. "The one who put those what you call them, those red patent stilettos on all his guy vics?"

Ryan shrugged, shoving his hands into his pockets. "Yeah. Like a less classy version of that. Sweatier, too."

"Takes all sorts, bro," Esposito said sagely.

"Truer words," said Castle, with a world-weary sigh.

Sometimes Kate felt like a kindergarten teacher. "Could we focus, please?"

Not one of the men looked the least bit abashed, but Esposito said, "I'll call and get that security footage, no problem." He pulled his iPhone out of his pocket and headed outside to make the call, Ryan sloping along after him because the two of them were apparently surgically joined at the hip. Kate had seen married couples who hung around with one another less than those two did.

"Well," Castle said in the suddenly quiet room, "I think that was a good couple of hour's work." He sounded far too cheery, especially given that he'd gotten the call about coming down here the morning after finishing a national promo tour, and that Kate had flat out refused to stop at Starbucks on the way to a crime scene. His hands rested on his hips, as if to flaunt that ridiculous vest even more.

Kate eyed him. "If you're going to gloat," she said, "could we please get this over with now?"

"I do not gloat!" Castle protested. "Maybe, at times, I have a certain healthy respect for my own achievements…"

"Smug," Kate told him. "You're insufferably smug, Castle." She took one last look around the studio. The techs had taken pictures of the room from every possible angle, but it never hurt to have a clear picture of the geography of the crime scene in her own mind—to be able to recall not just its layout, but the smells and the sounds and the quality of the light. It was her own personal map, one that she could layer with all the other murders she had a hunch DiNatale was involved with—Central Park in the rain; a sixth-floor walk up, crowded with books and cluttered with papers; a lawyer slumped over his desk, fountain pen still clutched in his hand. Kate knew that all she needed was to find a way to merge all those disparate places into one, to make a single map that would lead her back to DiNatale.

"It's called _self-esteem_, Beckett," Castle said airily as they walked out of the room. "You should look into it sometime."

Kate stared at him; as was so often the case with him, she wasn't quite sure if she should gape at him, or laugh. "You're kidding me, right?"

"Now Nikki Heat, there's someone with a healthy appreciation for her own talents," Castle said, pointing a finger at her. "Critics at the New York Times, Publisher's Weekly _and_ the Los Angeles Times all agree."

"I have a gun," Kate reminded him as they made their way down the steps, "and no jury in the world would convict me."

"Could you possibly hurt this face?" He rearranged his features into something that was probably supposed to be a charming pout, but instead made him look as if he were suffering a mild concussion.

Kate arched an eyebrow at him and said nothing.

"Forget I said anything," Castle said hurriedly. "How about coffee on me this morning? Anything you want."

"Venti quad shot macchiato," she said without having to stop and think. Kate had the feeling that caffeine was going to be an imperative today.

Castle was, at least, capable of some diplomacy, because he said nothing more than an even, "As the lady wishes," and didn't hold the street door open for her—let her make her own way out into the bright September sun.


End file.
